The Effect Of Scaffolding Instruction On Rural Junior Two Students’ Oral Pragmatic Competence Based On Speech Act Theory

With the promotion of quality-oriented education in recent years,the ultimate goal of English learning is not to focus on the examination anymore.Scholars and teachers began to focus on the communicative efficiency in English.Pragmatic competence,as one of the most important parts of language learning,has attracted more and more attention from researchers.Pragmatic competence refers to the ability to understand and use language to communicate effectively and appropriately,but compared with junior high school students living in urban areas,junior high school students living in rural areas lack the opportunity and context for real English language communication,and therefore their pragmatic competence appears to be weaker.Hence,it becomes a meaningful and interesting topic on how to help these students develop their spoken English pragmatic competence through the adaption of certain teaching strategies or approaches(such as scaffolding instruction).According to the pragmatic tests and questionnaire survey conducted in the two classes,this paper first investigates and describes the current situations of rural junior two students’ oral English pragmatic competence.In addition,the author attempts to explore the influence of scaffolding instruction on rural junior two school students’ oral English pragmatic competence.The teaching experiment lasted for sixteen weeks in two parallel classes in a rural middle school.The result shows that in general the scaffolding instruction can help improve the pragmatic competence in terms of rural middle school students’ oral English pragmatic competence,especially in greeting,asking suggestion,disagreeing,making request,complimenting,and apologizing.This study has the following implications for teaching: rural English teachers should consciously integrate their English classes with pragmatic competence development,and can use teaching methods like scaffolding instruction and organize teaching activities which is beneficial to improve students’ pragmatic competence.Meanwhile,parents and students should also attach great importance to the improvement of the pragmatic competence in English.